CARIBOU, Maine — With the City Council setting the 2015 mill rate at 22.46, up from last year’s 22.30, the prospect of a town called Lyndon, which promises tax savings of up to 28 percent, sounds pretty good to rural residents.
But secession committee members say that secession can be avoided if the City Council takes action on what committee members state are the “eight ways to avoid secession.” The eight ways were expected to be the topic of last night’s discussion between committee and city council members.
The first problem the secession committee states in a 54-page report is Caribou’s “city council/city manager” form of government. Committee spokesperson Paul Camping has said this form of government is inappropriate for rural residents and needs to replaced with a board of selectmen to give all residents an equal voice and direct representation.
Mayor Gary Aiken has said in the past that moving away from the city council form of government won’t work because he believes a board of selectmen will allow special parties to have a stranglehold on the government for their own party interests.
“They have that right now,” committee member Maynard St. Peter said. “Each department goes in there and lobbies for its budget.” St. Peter believes what Aiken has said is a red herring to the real problems. “What we want are representatives from each ward. We would separate the city into six wards, with a representative from each ward with an equal number of people in each ward.”
Second on the list to avoid secession is to reform the city charter. The item states, “The city charter contains provisions that are unlawful, unconstitutional and violates the civil rights of every citizen in Caribou.” The charter reads “… The qualified voters of the City shall have power to propose ordinances to the Council and, if the Council fails to adopt an ordinance so proposed without any change in substance, to adopt or reject it at a City election,” but what committee members highlight and consider unlawful is where the charter continues, “provided that such power shall not extend to the budget or capital program or any ordinance relating to appropriation of money, levy of taxes or salaries of City officers or employees.”
The charter also says “… The qualified voters of the city shall have power to require reconsideration by the Council of any adopted ordinance and, if the Council fails to repeal an ordinance so reconsidered, to approve or reject it at a City election,” and the committee highlights, “provided that such power shall not extend to the budget or capital program or any emergency ordinance or ordinance relating to appropriation of money or levy of taxes or salaries of City officers or employees,” which the committee feels is unconstitutional.
“As once can easily see, the citizens of Caribou are powerless to exercise their right to petition their government on budgetary and spending matters,” the report sates.
Article one of the charter under Powers of the City reads, “The City shall have all powers possible for a city to have under the constitution and laws of this State as fully and completely as though they were specifically enumerated in this Charter,” and continues in section 1.02 under Construction, “The powers of the City under this Charter shall be construed liberally in favor of the City, and the specific mention of particular powers in the Charter shall not be construed as limiting in any way the general power stated in this article.”
These sections the committee believes assert the City Council’s rights to unlimited powers under the authority of the constitution and laws of the state of Maine, “but then tramples with calloused impunity, on the rights of its citizens,” the report states.
Item three to avoid secession concerns the matter of the city council refusing to implement zero-based funding. “The Committee believes that Zero-Based Budgeting (ZBB) is a better tool to use when crafting an expense budget as it is more likely to result in less spending, thus averting tax increases. This methodology requires the City Manager and his Department Heads to examine and justify every expense, each year, taking nothing for granted. It can easily identify wasteful spending, shortages and expenses for unneeded programs,” the report states.
The committee’s report claims “Caribou presently uses an incremental spreadsheet method wherein the amounts approved for the previous year’s budget are augmented by a predetermined percentage and adopted for the current year.” And committee members feel the problem lies where “the budget for the current year stands on the foundation provided by the previous year’s budget and in turn, provides the foundation of the succeeding year’s budget; all of which have escaped the line-by-line scrutiny that comes from zero-based budgeting.”
The remaining ways to avoid secession include: reducing a city workforce that is too large and too costly, making the ambulance department profitable, reducing high taxes that negatively impact the rural real estate market, cutting the capital expense budget and removing a “strong bias” against rural territory residents.
These solutions are laid out on city’s website at cariboumaine.org under the news tab. Committee members urge the public to read their 54-page report and see how secession can be avoided if the city council is willing to listen.
“We’re looking for the city council to propose resolutions to those eight problems,” St. Peter said. “I don’t believe they can come up with resolutions that will be a permanent fix, but we don’t want to go there not thinking they won’t do that, they might just do it, we’re hopeful that they will. We hope that they will make a sincere intent to resolve these problems.”
If the city can meet all of the committee’s criteria Caribou would remain a city. “If they could change the way they do things, I mean and fix it permanently so they can’t undo it the next day, we’re at a point now where we need this in law for us to be able to back off from where our mission is,” St. Peter said.
Depending on the results of last night’s meeting, the committee is prepared to go to the State House and call for a referendum vote, but first they would seek a legislator to submit the bill.
“We have not made a determination, it would have to be one of our representatives that submits this legislation and we want to put enough pressure on them to make sure that they represent us as well as the rest of the city,” St. Peter explained.
